Batemans Brewery

Batemans was founded in 1874 by George Bateman, a local farmer who sold his farm in nearby Friskney in order to rent a brewery in Wainfleet, situated by the railway. He bought the brewery equipment for £505 10s (roughly equivalent to £30,000 today); a year later he bought the lease for £800. Before he retired, Edwin Crowe, from whom Bateman had bought his equipment, passed on his knowledge of the craft to George and his wife Suzanna (who had had a little experience of home brewing). Crowe's expert brewer stayed on with Bateman for some years, despite his blindness. In 1880 Bateman had earned enough from the business to buy Salem House, a Georgian building some 200 yards from the original…

On his twenty-first birthday, Harry Bateman had been given a pub by his father; in the 1920s he began to expand upon that beginning, and bought a group of pubs generally thought to be worthless. This chain was expanded in 1927 by the purchase of the Vine Hotel in Skegness, and in 1935 by the building of the County Hotel in the same town. In 1957, when Batemans already owned a chain of seventy pubs, they bought another twenty-nine, mostly run-down pubs to the north of Boston, as well as some in the town itself. It took eight years to renovate and obtain licences for them (at the time, a pub could not have a licence unless it had at least two rooms). Batemans beers are now available from pubs…